Saturday, October 5, 2013

Beaverton, Ha Ha...

I just saw an ad pop up as I was browsing a story online and it struck me as funny: Retire in Beaverton!, it exclaimed.

I live in Portland. Beaverton is an incorporated city nearby, home to Nike Empire and other notable companies. It is a sprawling community of single-family homes and a barely identifiable downtown core dominated by car lots and small businesses peddling the quaint and insignificant.

It's a bedroom community, striving to identify as something else, something more localized.

The auto rules the place; its streets are wide and unfriendly. To walk there is to stroll in a concrete desert. In short, Beaverton has a lot to offer as a workplace, but a couple of freeways and space-eating commuter roadways gut its essence and make it particularly unappealing to the eye and soul--not to mention walkers.

The planners messed it up years ago, creating a plainly unattractive Nowheresville.

It hasn't anything to offer, though it is serviced in part by Tri-Met's trains and buses, which is not enough to entice.

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Portland, Oregon

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About Reality

Terry Simons is the founder of Round Bend Press Books, Round Bend Press Detritus, and an associated writing/editing service to aid and abet renegade authors. He has worked as a day laborer, dishwasher, factory drone, community organizer, journalist, media consultant and freelance writer. He attended the University of Oregon and Portland State University, where he read journalism, politics, literature and history. He is the author most recently of "Along Came the Death Squad: Political and Scattered Notes."
RBP books are available from Amazon and Lulu.
Write to: roundbendpressbooks@yahoo.com